"Even if you practice only for an hour a day with faith and inspiration, good qualities will steadily increase. Regular practice makes it easy to transform your mind. From seeing only relative truth, you will eventually reach a profound certainty in the meaning of absolute truth."Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.

Very interesting discussion - I have often wanted to break off from society and set up in a community that was not based on power, greed, and status - a more natural, sustainable, focussed and friendly environment. There are a few intentional communities I have looked into - but they are all in places where I don't have citizenship so could never join in. I have looked at some of the alternate methods of living though, reading about such places.

Another point I would like to mention is that over a year or two, your body can become accustomed to using far less artificial heating than the normal town dweller. You may not need as much heating as you currently do after a year or so. I have lived in NSW Australia - and now in England which is colder - and I have not used heating for rooms, only for cooking and heating water for a shower, for almost 5 years. I thought it impossible to do in England because of the frosts, snow, etc in winter - but i am coming up to my third winter without having/using a room heater in this colder climate and it gets easier as you get used to it. A lot more 'power' products can easily be lived without if you get used to doing things by hand, too. (I can vouch for being able to live without a car, microwave, ipod, cell phone, vcr, lawn mower, hair dryer, TV, radio, blender, etc.) If you think back a few hundred years, we didn't have electricity anyway....

maybay wrote:The US is the result of wanting to break off from European society and there's no reason to suspect their aims were anything different from your own. How is your motivation different?

The US is a failed society on many levels. Over time the US will eventually do the right thing but this can span generations (racism, slavery and continued anti-Gay hatred are three examples - only slavery was eliminated over time in 1964, racism abates but is still a force and Gay people were just declared to be people in the US).

Ideally I would like to establish a self-sufficient (I am aware of the impossibility of that in the long term) community, ideally a Buddhist community, were people can living peacefully without incurring onerous debt and pursue their life goals.

Or just live by myself nicely somewhere but still supporting the goals of recreating a positive society.

We were taught that US society was fair and just in the long term, even usually in the short term. This has proven to be false. There are many longstanding problems in US society some of which are not even acknowledged. Homelessness is one of those: in the current reimagining of the problem homelessness is primarily a result of an unintended consequence of a Reagan Administration reform: however homelessness is a longterm problem going back to at least the 1920's - it most likely has a longer history and IMV it appears to be caused in part by the society deciding in a sense to reject particular people and deprive them of resources very much like Shirley Jackson's "Lottery"*. A similar process seems to be at play currently with unemployment (i.e. unemployment is not being caused by strictly market forcces). I am suggesting an alternative society not founded on materialism and economic Darwinism but on compassion and learning for the purpose of serving sentient beings.

Kirt

*So how can this happen? There are not explicitly defined social rules undergirding individual societies and communities that actually run the society. Social interaction at this scale is governed by these rules behind the scenes. These rules form a computational system. One of the computational results is the identification of and rejection of undesirable people. This is related to the multiple levels of control of people that in an extreme form results in slavery. I don't know if sociology covers this in this way but I have read of a couple of professors of sociology at the University of Toronto that wrote a paper in the late-90's primarily on demographics predicting large scale social instability and at least touched on these unacknowledged rules. And as a computer science person I tend to see most things as computational systems.

"Even if you practice only for an hour a day with faith and inspiration, good qualities will steadily increase. Regular practice makes it easy to transform your mind. From seeing only relative truth, you will eventually reach a profound certainty in the meaning of absolute truth."Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.

By understanding everything you perceive from the perspective of the view, you are freed from the constraints of philosophical beliefs.By understanding that any and all mental activity is meditation, you are freed from arbitrary divisions between formal sessions and postmeditation activity.- Longchen Rabjam -

kirtu wrote:We were taught that US society was fair and just in the long term, even usually in the short term. This has proven to be false.

So you had expectations and now you're going to fix things with more?

That is indeed the American utopian impulse. And it's correct; it's one of the things that made America great actually. But in this case the impulse is to help create an enlightened society or at least a moral and compassionate society. In some sense this is the impluse of all religious utopian groups.

"Even if you practice only for an hour a day with faith and inspiration, good qualities will steadily increase. Regular practice makes it easy to transform your mind. From seeing only relative truth, you will eventually reach a profound certainty in the meaning of absolute truth."Kyabje Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche.

kirtu wrote:[... correct; it's one of the things that made America great actually. But in this case the impulse is to help create an enlightened society or at least a moral and compassionate society. In some sense this is the impluse of all religious utopian groups.Kirt

Unfortunately in America, too many people have only cents in mind, instead of ... sense .....

HHDL: "My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."

I checked with Mark Edwards, PhD. about making and burning algae pellets. He said it was OK, and that there were "no black particulates common in wood or dung smoke."

Algae grows incredibly fast. When conditions are right, it can double its mass (weight) in one day. It can be dried in the sun, and can make a low cost renewable fuel that does not require felling trees, sawing to length and splitting. Grow in a pond, skim off the top, let dry in the sun, collect, press into pellets, and burn in a pellet stove. Don't make algae logs to burn in a fireplace, as they may not dry properly, use thinner pieces that will dry--getting it just right may take some experimentation.

HHDL: "My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."